How to disable autoplay videos

I love the
internet. I live on it, research on it, buy stuff on it, talk to the world on
it and run a business through it. I also hate certain aspects of it. I hate how
ads are managed and I hate it when web administrators force a video to play on
the page even when you ask it not to. Today I’m going to show you how to stop
those annoying autoplay videos.

Autoplay
videos have to be one of the most annoying things on the internet. I have no
idea when website owners think you want to see or hear a video without even
choosing to do so. It’s bad manners and not recommended by any usability expert
that I have ever heard of. It uses mobile data without your permission, slows
down page loading and annoys me no end. Fortunately, there are ways to stop it
from happening.

Stop videos playing automatically on a web page

I use
Firefox as a browser but I know a lot of you use Chrome. I’ll show you how to disable autoplay
videos on both. I will also introduce you to a neat browser plugin that catches
all those videos the default browser setting does not.

Disable autoplay videos in
Firefox

I think Firefox
is the best but the setting to disable autoplay videos doesn’t often work. I
use this setting along with a browser extension to get what I want. Here’s how
to disable videos from within Firefox.

1. Type ‘about:config’ into a new
   Firefox tab.
2. Type ‘media.autoplay’ into the
   search box.
3. Change ‘media.autoplay.default’ from
   0 to 1.

This will
disable some autoplay videos from working. You will find it doesn’t work on all
of them though. You can change the setting to ‘2’ if you want to be prompted to
play the video rather than block them.

Disable autoplay videos in Chrome

Chrome also
offers a setting to disable autoplay videos.

1. Type ‘chrome://flags/autoplay-policy’
   into a new tab.
2. Type ‘autoplay’ into the search box.
3. Select ‘Document user activation is
   required’ in the dropdown box next to Autoplay Policy.

This tells
Chrome to not play the video unless you click play.

Disable HTML5 Autoplay

Even if you
change the default setting on your browser, some videos will still get through.
That’s especially true for some websites and social networks. So I also use a
neat browser extension called Disable HTML5 Autoplay. The extension is
unmaintained on Chrome right now but still works.

It’s available
for both Firefox
and for Chrome
and is well worth using. It blocks all videos that I have come across and doesn’t
get in the way at all.

Do you know
of any other reliable ways to disable videos from autoplaying when you land on
a web page?